


The Wild Hunt

by PrettyArbitrary



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Anal Sex, Blood, Fairy Tale Elements, M/M, Rough Sex, chase kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-11-13 23:16:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18040961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyArbitrary/pseuds/PrettyArbitrary
Summary: Jack specializes in catering to the needs of magical entities.  Some are easy, some are hard, but his motto is that no one walks away unsatisfied.  The world is a difficult place for the supernatural, these days, and someone has to look out for the ones who struggle to make ends meet.But the Wild Hunt?





	The Wild Hunt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Oricalcon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oricalcon/gifts).



> Originally for Kinktober 2017 Day 19: Chase kink.
> 
> Dedicated to oricalcon, who is the main reason this got finished.

Jack’s place does good business all year round, but during October he really cleans up. It’s a waning quarter moon on a Friday the 13th in the month before Halloween, and every table is full. The bar was too, till a few minutes ago, when the werewolf biker pack finished up their last round of Dogfish Head and left. 

There are bogeymen and a couple of self-conscious revenants tucked into the dimly lit booths in the nooks. The more brightly lit tables include a few vampires who seem to be competing for who can wear the most expensive velvet-and-lace ensemble, a coven of witches having a hen night, and a double table of withered old ancestor spirits playing mahjongg and complaining about how young people these days just don’t know how to leave a good offering anymore. Ghosts flicker in and out of reality here and there around the room. It can be hard to keep track of them, but Jack’s never let one get away with dodging the bill yet.

A slenderman bellies up to the bar while Jack is still wiping down the shed fur from the werewolves. It taps its finger on a little patch and shakes its head mournfully.

“I know,” Jack grumbles. “I’m going to have to use a lint roller to get it all.” 

It tilts an open palm toward the pile of money.

“Yeah, at least they’re good tippers. You after your usual?”

The slenderman nods, its spider-long legs tucking up on the bar stool. Jack cracks open a bottle of urchin’s tears and pours some out, then sets the bottle by the glass. “Nobody else seems in the mood for it tonight, so you’ve got it all to yourself.” The slenderman tips its glass toward him in a toast and then tosses it back. Into somewhere. There are things a smart bartender doesn’t ask about.

It was loud as hell in here earlier, with the boozed up werewolves, but now everything’s faded to a comfortable drone, underscored by the clacking of tiles and pierced occasionally by a female giggle from over where the witches are trading lewd quips about familiars. He does a round through the room to make sure the servers are keeping everybody happy. 

One of the ancestor spirits pats him on the shoulder when he switches out the cold ceremonial dumplings in the middle of the table for a steaming hot fresh plate. “My great great grandson could take some lessons from you, young man.”

A witch leans back in her seat when he passes by, to quietly flag him down. “Dearie, could we switch from the mead to some spiced sweet cider? I think _some_ of us are getting a bit toasty.” 

Neither of them looks at her friend across the table, who’s drinking her latest round of mead from the table’s candleholder, while the candle flame flickers merrily in the center of the honey-colored liquid. “Sure,” Jack says. “I’ll bring out a pitcher.”

He doesn’t even bother to check which of the ladies squeezes his ass when he turns away. 

Back behind the bar, he looks at it again, purses his lips at the dog hair that’s still sticking persistently to the finish, and ducks underneath to find the lint roller.

The doors bang open.

The doors bang open frequently. Some of his customers have auras that practically spontaneously manifest dramatic entrances. Jack’s had to install planks on the walls to protect the plaster from slamming door knobs. But this time, the room actually goes silent for a moment. He peeks over the bar to see why.

It’s Gabriel, ducking his head to keep his antlers clear of the lintel above the doors.

Jack straightens up to stand and meet him as he heads up to the bar. The slenderman scoops up its glass in one hand and the bottle in the other, and skitters up the wall on long black tentacles to hang in a corner near the ceiling, well away from the new customer.

Gabriel pulls his gloves off as he makes his way over, then lays them on the bar so he can offer his hand. “Jack. You’re looking well.”

Jack takes his hand and shakes it. “My lord. Not as well as you.” If the onceover he gives Gabriel is a bit greedy, Jack’s willing to own it. The Huntsman looks particularly fantastic tonight, his beautifully tailored riding leathers fitting him like a second skin and stained dark across the shoulders from the drizzle outside, and his antlers gleaming regally in the room’s lights. “What brings you here at this time of year? You must be awfully busy with preparations.”

“I am.” Gabriel accepts a glass of red wine with a wicked smile that makes Jack’s cheeks turn pink. After an approving sip, he slouches panther-graceful against the bar and swirls the liquid absently in the goblet. “That’s what brings me here. I’m having difficulty finding suitable prey this year.” Low uneasy mutters go around the room. Gabriel ignores them in favor of watching Jack over the rim of his glass.

“Oh.” Jack takes a deep breath and pours himself a glass of his own. 

Jack specializes in catering to the needs of magical entities. Some are easy, some are hard, but his motto is that no one walks away unsatisfied. The world is a difficult place for the supernatural, these days, and someone has to look out for the ones who struggle to make ends meet.

But the Wild Hunt? That’s literally throwing someone to the wolves.

“People just don’t follow the old ways like they used to, I suppose. I can try.” Jack tries to sound less dubious than he feels. He firms up his confidence in his own creativity and looks back over to Gabriel. “I’m sure I can come up with something.”

Gabriel smiles slightly, then turns to lean in over the bar till their faces are less than a foot apart. “I had something specific in mind.” His eyes catch the firelight. They glow the rich red-brown of old blood and Jack can’t look away. “If you’d be game to be game.”

“Me?” The word is an undignified squeak. Jack recoils from that almost as much as the suggestion of being prey to the Wild Hunt.

Gabriel grins and leans against the bar, watching him while he mulls it over. “It would be something special. And if anyone could escape me....”

Jack licks his lips. Famously, no one escapes the Wild Hunt. Most people aren’t foolish enough to volunteer to try. But there are those competitive souls who for whom the challenge of the impossible beats like a drum in their heads...and Jack is one of them.

He takes a drink that’s more like a gulp, manages not to choke on it, licks his lips again. “And what if I can’t?”

Gabriel leans over the bar, elegant horns looming over Jack’s head and eyes smouldering through his lashes. There’s a deadly dangerous tease of a smile hovering at the edges of his lips that makes Jack want to choke himself with another gulp of wine. “Well, then I suppose we’ll find out just how immortal you are.”

****

The Wild Hunt is a dance between hunter and prey. It pounds to the beat of the blood of every living thing, every moment of every day, and when the hounds begin to bay it leaps with the pulse and the hammer of the feet of both chaser and chased. The tale of life and death is the oldest of all, and Jack—the famous Jack of all the stories—eats and breathes it, because he is made of stories.

But the Wild Hunt is not made of stories. It’s the thing of which stories are made.

Jack contemplates this, in his first hours, as he runs and climbs and scrabbles and hides with the Huntsman’s horn sounding in the distance. He thinks about what it takes to kill a story. Do they need to destroy the idea of him, or just craft for him the perfect ending?

He also thinks of Gabriel’s leather-clad thighs, stained by horse sweat. Of gloves so perfectly molded to his hands that they ripple with the flex of his knuckles like they’re his native skin. Of his beautiful rust-colored eyes lit to burning red as the bloodlust pours through him and spreads to infect all those who ride with him. That bloodlust, Jack now understands intimately, is the Wild Hunt. He knows because Gabriel’s fever took him too. It’s a cord that binds the two of them, Gabriel to Jack and everyone in between them, in a shared coveting of the heat and life Jack clings to, and that Gabriel craves. There is no hunt without the prey, after all.

Gabriel’s thirst for him burns Jack from the inside out, lighting him up with vicious resolve to win and live, at any cost, and the fear of what the Wild Hunt—what Gabriel—will do to him if he doesn’t.

But Jack didn’t go into this without a plan.

Hours before the first of the three dawns he’s tasked with surviving through, he finds his chance. Blood pours out over his hands and forms a cloak of steam around him in the cold air as he seizes a straying huntsman from behind and slits his throat. The scent and heat of a shed life hangs about him in a disguise made of the the most priceless finery as he takes the huntsman’s clothes and swings up onto his horse to ride. 

He loses himself for the next two days. There is no way to ride with the Wild Hunt without being swallowed by it. They course, so thirsty for their prey’s life that Jack can taste the craving for his own blood in his mouth. Their eyes burn with it, their hounds bay, and Gabriel, Lord of the Hunt, leads them. There’s no urbane aristocrat in him now. From behind him, Jack watches his shoulders surge with the charging stride of his horse, and it’s the rush of the wolf pack, the cutting edge of the north wind, and the devouring dark beneath the pines. He’s a living ache of want in Jack’s mind and belly and it fuses with Jack’s old desire for him until he can’t tell where one of them ends and the other begins, or the difference between craving blood and body.

He rides and he dreams of the rueful pride in Gabriel’s crimson eyes upon seeing that Jack has outwitted him. If he can survive the Lord of the Hunt, then he can dare to touch him.

His confidence that he can do it lasts till the third and final night.

He’s riding the high of his cunning. He hadn’t imagined it would be like this. The Wild Hunt is more intoxicating than any drug he’s ever known. His head spins with the desire to chase, to kill, and then again with the need to run, to live. Even though he is the prey in question, it’s all he can do to stay on his horse and resist doing anything stupid.

They ride through a forest painted in black and white. Trees are dark cutouts, and hard-edged moon shadows lay like black holes across glinting snow and drab winter leaves, till everything is more illusion than real. Jack finds his world shaped by his other senses. The steam rising from his horse drifts up in warmer stripes of air against his skin; he can feel the hard ground thump under its hooves with every step. Everything smells of earth and ice and sweating animals and blood. And Gabriel. Gabriel’s scent is everywhere.

Jack belongs to it all, and the immensity of it teases at the perennial weak point of his ego. Pushing his luck has always been his favorite vice.

Oh, he wants to see the look in Gabriel’s eyes. Is he puzzled by the lack of Jack’s trail? Is he proud? Is he impatient to have Jack’s taste in his mouth? Almost without willing it, Jack dares to get close enough to find out.

Jack feels the very moment his luck snaps. Their eyes meet and it hits him like a blow. The Lord of the Hunt is glorious and terrible, the predatory embodiment of nature. His antler crown seems to twist in the shadows and moonlight, reaching hungrily for Jack. And in his flaming, bloody eyes, Jack has the pleasure of seeing shocked recognition, just before he draws and swings his sword in a lightning strike.

Gabriel had paused at the door of Jack’s bar to turn back, one fine-gloved hand resting on the latch. “Did you know,” he’d said in a tone smooth as honey, “that someone who survives the Wild Hunt can gain his heart’s desire?”

“Cagey old hunter,” Jack had hissed back. He’d felt his decision made on the spot, clicking into place as firmly as if placed by someone else’s hand. Oh, the Huntsman always has known how to get what he wants.

Gabriel is a harsh creature. He loves strength and the will to survive. Jack had found the arrogance and the optimism to take this as an invitation to a courtship, not a murder.

But as he throws himself from his horse, he knows if he can’t prove himself worthy, it’ll be a murder sure enough.

Everything is thunder and howling. Jack dances for his life in the heart of the Wild Hunt, amidst the stomping, cutting hooves, the scything blades and the tearing fangs of the yipping, frothing hounds. 

But his luck hasn’t deserted him entirely. He looks up, desperate for an option, and as if in answer, an opening forms before him. He darts for it, straight at one of the horses. 

The horses aren’t normal animals; strong and strange and feral in their own right, they can take some rough handling. He lunges for the horse’s bridle, feeling a scrape of teeth as a hound’s jaws snap closed just behind his heel, and uses his momentum to swing himself beneath the beast’s neck. It stumbles forward under his weight, careening into its neighbors as he clears the melee.

The creature rights itself with unearthly speed—they’re more intelligent than any horse should be—but Jack’s already knocked a hole in the circle they were drawing closed around him and cleared its perimeter. He leaps for a tree branch and scampers up into it, then with a wild laugh he takes a flying leap to the next one before dropping himself to the ground on the other side of a briar thicket. All that beanstalk climbing wasn’t for nothing.

The hounds bell behind him as they scramble and burst into chase. They seem to change as they course, a trick of the shadows seeming to show them in one blink as huge strong-jawed beasts with long legs, wiry fur and a dense ruff over their throats and shoulders, and then as people in the next, naked and wild with the Hunt shining in their eyes. Their dual forms move as one as they leap and snap for him, voices of man and beast both reverberating with bloodlust.

The fear of that howl is legendary, and it crashes in on him like a fist coming down on his hindbrain. His muscles quiver with the weakness of panic, and strength threatens to flood out from his nerves. He’s prey, prey, prey, the howls cry behind him, and he knows to the root of his being what will happen to him if he’s caught.

Jack bares his teeth and forces his legs firm. He’s challenged giants and Satan himself, and no one gets to change his role on him. The Hunt may be born of something older than stories, but he knows its secrets.

He spares a single glance behind him to see the huntsmen rallying back onto the pursuit. There’s a low bluff about 40 yards away. If he can get to it and slide down, he’ll regain some distance. The horses won’t be able to follow him down the bank.

He lowers his head and makes a break for it. This isn’t the time to conserve energy.

The leather of his stolen gloves has given up the ghost. His scraped, battered hands leave bloody marks on the trees as he grabs them to swing around them rather than lose speed. It’s a maneuver that even magical horses can’t match. He laughs. He feels breathless and wild. The life-or-death exhilaration makes each pounding footfall of his run feel like it could push him off into the sky.

It’s the Hunt in his blood, intoxicating him. The predator needs the prey just as much as the prey needs to live. His heart leaps against the pull of both as the edge of the bank resolves. And then a great black shape comes out of nowhere to ram him from the side. 

The earth strikes a blow against his ribs as he’s knocked to the ground, and he finds himself staring up at Gabriel. Under the arc of his horns, those commanding red eyes burn down at Jack’s form, the color of blood or flame and glowing in the dark. 

He jerks up to his knees as the hunters arrive. The hounds lunge forward at the movement and then reluctantly melt back again, milling, at a handwave from Gabriel. The riders jingle and creak as they form up in a second, looser circle behind the hounds. They wear elegantly tooled yet stained riding leathers that match Jack’s stolen set. Their weapons are out, and they look regal and exhilarated in their armor and riding gear, and just as eager as the hounds.

Fair enough, because it thrums in Jack too. Fight. Die. Kill. Flee. They pound in him with each beat of his overworked heart.

A shrill whistle pierces the night. The hounds pull into a tight circle around him. 

They stand taut and silent, so close he can smell and feel their hot breath puffing against him. Their sides are heaving after their long run, lips peeled back from their teeth and foamy spittle falling from their mouths. He can see the bloodlust in their eyes, both in human and canine forms. They strain at every muscle, awaiting the command that will permit them to fall on him with his blood in their mouth. 

Jack pushes to his feet. Anticipation twists in the pit of his stomach--anticipation of teeth in his flesh, of the pain of swords and blood sprays. Anticipation of the perfect ending he can feel the threads of narrative and nature tying inside him. 

“Careful,” Gabriel says. All attention turns to him.

His voice seems to ring in the trees, the crystal chill of the air, and Jack’s lungs, as if he’s speaking through them. The power that had been banked when he visited Jack at the bar is fully unleashed now. Gabriel burns, beautiful and terrible, eyes alight like stoked coals and his horns a wild crown bestowed by Nature herself.

Gabriel is more than a spirit; more than a god. He’s a natural law given form. The Lord of the Hunt _is_ nature, red in tooth and claw. He is the will to live at any cost, the bloody thread binding predator and prey. He is the edge where life and death meet.

The edge Jack is balanced on. He feels giddy just looking at him. 

Jack straightens up carefully, holding those burning red eyes in unspoken challenge. There are many kinds of prey. Just because one is hunted, doesn’t mean they can't be a predator themselves. Gabriel asked Jack to deliver something special, and Jack has never failed to make good on a request.

He feels afraid, as he stares down his death, but it only fuels him. The Wild Hunt is life and death between his teeth, under his fingernails. It's the shape of a new story, hovering at the cliff edge of resolution. 

The moment of stillness holds all of them in its grip. Then Gabriel moves, the hounds shifting aside reluctantly as he nudges his horse to stop before Jack. Jack holds Gabriel’s eyes defiantly, head high, as Gabriel reaches out to capture his chin in one elegant hand. One thumb presses down on Jack’s lower lip. “A worthy hunt,” he murmurs. “You were everything I’d hoped you’d be.”

He turns Jack’s face up and admires his features for a moment. “You’re the Jack of the stories. Will you come back to life if I eat your soul?”

Jack shrugs, loose-limbed with exhaustion. “I don’t know. I’m not sure whether I have one.” He’s lived a long time, archetypally human but also, in the way of archetypes, too perfectly so to quite be the real thing. “I suppose there’s only one way to find out.”

That great rack of antlers sweeps forward in a stately arc as Gabriel’s chin lowers at whatever he sees in Jack’s face. Then he raises a hand, and snaps his fingers.

Jack shouts as the Wild Hunt surges for him. For a horrible second, as they begin tearing at him, his doubt swallows him. He judged wrong, they’re going to kill him. Weapons swing, claws lash out. They tear at his clothes, at his skin. Where his blood wells up, hands grab and tongues slaver.

Jack pulls himself together and focuses, taking whatever he has to in order to reach Gabriel.

He saves himself from getting dragged under by getting a hand on Gabriel’s stirrup. Gabriel swings for him, prepared for an attack. But Jack isn’t attacking. He yelps as Gabriel’s claws pierce his side but doesn’t try to avoid them, grabbing Gabriel’s arm and using the toe of his boot in the stirrup to vault upward till he’s face to face with Gabriel and can lock their mouths together in a kiss.

With the kiss, the story seals, and Jack molds himself to Gabriel, caught in the throes of it. His clothes are ripped into strips, stained with his own blood, and as Gabriel's claws sink possessively into his back through what's left, he knows in his bones the picture they make will become a myth: the Hunt that closed with a capture, instead of a death. Jack's greatest legend, and one of Gabriel's too. Jack laughs against Gabriel's mouth at his triumph. 

“The prey captures the Lord of the Hunt,” he answers Gabriel's questioning look. “You asked for something special.”

Is he gloating? Yes, and he doesn't care. He bites down on Gabriel’s lower lip till he draws blood in a mark of his own, his victory blow, and laughs again when Gabriel snarls at the taste of his own blood and shoves Jack till he’s bowed backward over the saddle’s high pommel. There are hands on Jack’s legs, and in his hair, and grabbing at his arms--the other hunters, maybe even the hounds; he’s too disoriented, too high on Gabriel and victory to keep track. The claws bite through what’s left of his clothes and shred them off him, drawing fresh runnels of blood in their wake. It slicks their grip on him, makes their touches sting and burn. He's not complaining; the pain lights up his nerves till the cold air seems to trail over his skin like fingertips.

Gabriel’s chest heaves against him, with Gabriel's panting, hot breath flowing over Jack’s collarbones as he scents him, snuffling and licking at his throat. His gloves are kid skin, dragging soft as sin across Jack’s skin. The nap of it catches sweetly at his nipple. When his breath catches, Gabriel returns to pinch and roll it teasingly, just at the edge of pain, chuckling darkly at the way it makes Jack gasp and squirm. 

A hand in Jack’s hair tightens and yanks his head back till his throat is bare, and then Gabriel’s teeth close gently on his adam’s apple. It's a reminder of Jack's role here, that he might have won but his purpose is still to be consumed. Jack whimpers with the force of it, as Gabriel's teeth slowly bear down and remind him of the past three days and the seductive terror of being devoured. 

The pressure grows enough to crack Jack's smugness with the first hint of worry, and then Gabriel pulls back with a mocking laugh and kisses him on the bite mark. 

“Remember fear,” he says. There's hunger and fondness both in his face and Jack isn't sure whether he's been punished or advised. 

Those beautifully gloved hands continue sliding down his body, smearing through the trails of blood till the leather grows slick on his skin. One seizes his balls, and Gabriel laughs again as Jack’s bare cock, pressed up against him, jumps.

“Not the way I usually take my prize,” Gabriel rumbles in his ear as that hand slips back between his legs. “But this has its appeal.”

Gabriel's finger presses against his entrance and begins to push in. Jack yelps. His hips buck, but the hands hold him in place, and with the state of mind he's in, the ache of being forced open sizzles in his bloodstream. He moans and struggles a little, mainly for the pleasure of putting up a fight, as a second finger enters him and begins to spread him open.

“Good,” Gabriel speaks the word against his skin, sounding deeply pleased. “Mine.” Then his mouth closes around Jack’s nipple with a bite hard enough to bruise his aureole, licking and suckling till he has Jack arching his back, pressing his chest up pleadingly for more.

The gloved fingers are deep inside him now, slick with the blood they collected from his skin and relentless in their stretching and seeking inside him. The fine-grained leather drags exquisitely along his inner walls.

They pull out, but he doesn’t even have time to find a protest before Gabriel is seizing his hips and pulling him onto his cock.

The air is frigid against his bare skin, but he feels fevered. Gabriel’s cock bottoms out inside him, a thick, stinging hot intrusion that steals Jack's breath from him. His body spasms and bears down, trying to force him out, but Gabriel holds him in place, making him take it. It's awful and delicious. Jack feels caught in a snare, his own body trapping him. The Lord of the Hunt holds some sway over virility too, and oh, Jack can feel it. It's a current that runs from Gabriel into him, coaxing his body to soften and submit the longer Gabriel holds him there, inviting him to a keen awareness of just how deep inside him Gabriel is, just how demandingly his girth stretches Jack, how perfectly Jack's body molds to him. Jack welcomes it, and savors the way his body melts till it feels like torture that Gabriel is keeping his hips from chasing for more. He growls in frustration and bounces once, hard, in Gabriel's lap to make his point. 

Gabriel laughs again, even deeper than before, and obliges him, fucking into him with splendid abandon. Jack closes his eyes, heart in his throat at the sensation in that magnificent dick moving in and out of him. His legs are still held, the hands of the Hunt participating by pulling him tight till he has no leverage, can only ride out his fucking as Gabriel pulls him down bruisingly by the hips onto his thrusts. 

He already knows Gabriel owns his orgasm, but that doesn't stop him from chasing it, till his abs and ass and thighs hurt from trying and his back aches from his position and Gabriel's cock inside him has him feeling tender and sensitized. He's shaking with exhaustion and need by the time he gives himself up and lets Gabriel have his will. 

The next little while is amazing. 

When the sun rises, he’s still in Gabriel’s arms, with his legs around that sleek waist. Gabriel’s cloak is slung to wrap around them both. It’s supernaturally warm, keeping the winter bite of the air off Jack’s bare skin. He’s still on Gabriel’s cock. It rocks into him with the leisurely roll of the horse’s walk, and his own cock rocks against Gabriel’s stomach where it’s trapped between them. Jack groans against Gabriel’s shoulder as he comes back to himself. He aches _everywhere_ , and somehow he still wants more. With Gabriel, maybe he always will. He's waited long enough. 

“I'm going to be sore for days.”

Gabriel lifts his hand to comb gently through Jack’s sweat-spiked hair. “Good morning.”

Jack lifts his head and shifts, then groans again. Gabriel makes a matching noise. “Well…” He’s not sure what he wants to ask, exactly. Why are they still here? What happens next? In the light of morning, the rules of the normal world are reasserting themselves, and things like that seem to matter. 

“I am impressed, Jack.” Gabriel does sound impressed. The rest of the Hunt is gone. Jack wonders who they are, and where they go. Are they living people, who perhaps chose this, or dead souls forever in Gabriel's power? “Before you showed yourself last night, I really was beginning to wonder if you’d managed to escape me after all. But I never imagined you finding this solution.”

 _This_ is very apparent. Gabriel rolls his hips and Jack shudders. He could get so used to this. Also he could use a very long soak in a hot bath. 

“You belong to me, now. You know that? Those souls the Wild Hunt takes are mine to do with as I please.” And now he sounds smug.

“Well, I can take a guess at what pleases you.” Jack tries to sound witty instead of tired. God, he has a shift at the bar tonight. “Well, my lord, this vassal respectfully suggests that you should come home with me, I'll close the bar till tomorrow night and we can spend the next 24 hours soaking in a hot spring and having a lot of sex.”

Gabriel snorts. “Cheeky.”

“If you didn't want cheeky, you came to the wrong bartender. I'm not hearing a no.”

“Well, I've heard worse ideas,” Gabriel admits. “It sounds almost like you planned this.”

Jack lays his head on Gabriel's shoulder with a sigh and snuggles in. “Now that it's done and the adrenaline and magic are fading, I should set aside some time for a belated panic attack.”

Gabriel tugs his cloak closer around them. “Jack.”

“Of course I planned it. I planned like crazy, with backup plans and also panic backup plans. I've been imagining how I'd get my hands on you for years now, maybe centuries. But you can fuck right off if you're going to pretend like this isn't exactly what you wanted when you walked into my bar. You know I always find people exactly what they ask for, and I did this time too. You did promise me my heart's desire if I won, you'll remember.”

Gabriel makes a thoughtful noise. It's not quite agreement but Jack doesn't care. He's right. Gabriel will admit it eventually, the stubborn bastard.

“Another thing,” Jack says after a moment of quiet basking. “We can argue about who took whom and how, _but_ ,” he cuts Gabriel off with a glare, “if you think I'm giving up my bar, you've got another thing coming.”

He holds Gabriel's eyes for a moment, in what starts as a glare but quickly turns into frank admiration, then works an arm out of the cloak to grab him by an antler. “Now kiss me.”

Gabriel pull him close and does.

**Author's Note:**

> AAAAAAA MYSTICKAYLA MADE ME FANART: <https://thesmoltony.tumblr.com/post/186059098337/the-earth-strikes-a-blow-against-his-ribs-as-hes>


End file.
